


we carry the dead

by against_stars



Series: rome was also built on ruins [2]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 09:29:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5962384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/against_stars/pseuds/against_stars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Foolish, isn't it? To love a cooling corpse?"<br/>"Not at all, <em>amora</em>. I think that, too, was brave."</p><p>Riona Tabris tells Zevran about her wedding.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we carry the dead

**Author's Note:**

> I've wanted to expand on why my Tabris rejected Zevran's earring the first time he offered it for a while now.
> 
> Mentions of violence, alcohol, implications of sexual assault — standard fare for the City Elf origin. Shianni's story is not gone into detail, because that belongs to her and is not for Tabris to tell.

The sun has long set, but rather than return to their rooms in Arl Eamon's estate, the Warden has elected to stay with her family in the alienage for the night, and her neighbors have arranged an impromptu celebration of their rescue and her return. It is very elven, Zevran muses, to look in the face of tragedy past and refuse to let it bend them. To build a wagon out of the corpse of your home and carry the bones in defiance.

There are clear gaps in groups that even an outsider like him can see, holes and fractures of lost and stolen loved ones, but from within the Tabris home, and spilling out of it from doorway and window frame, there are grateful voices calling out for one another, grateful hands touching the faces of the ones still there, and music rising into the night sky.

Most of the Warden's party had returned to the estate by sunset, with only himself, Alistair, and Leliana remaining to enjoy the party with their Warden friend.

He is sitting by himself on a crate by the venadahl with a bottle of what could be called wine if one was feeling charitable when he hears her approach, her footsteps long branded into his memory as familiar and welcome. She taps his bottle with hers before she hops up onto the crate beside his, and for several long minutes they are quiet, the slosh of drink within glass keeping time with the chatter and gentle lute music swelling through the flats around them.

Riona is the one to break their silence. "I didn't tell you about the wedding."

"Ah, no," says Zevran agreeably, "that is certainly true."

"Even though you told me about Rinna."

He looks over at her, at the stiff line of her freckled brown shoulders, the set of her jaw as she tips back to swallow a mouthful of wine. It's so rare to see her out of Warden-issue armor that here, in a worn skirt and laced-up blouse that fit around her body so well it's obvious they belonged to her in her life before, with her dark hair out of its usual braid and curling in waves down her back, she looks more naked to him now than she does when the only thing against her skin is sweat and his mouth.

"It was not up for trade, _mi amora_ ," he says quietly, watching from the corner of his eyes as the tension in her shoulders grows. "As much fun as I usually have with 'show me yours, I'll show you mine,' your past belongs to you and is owed to no one. Not even myself."

Perhaps especially not himself. He hadn't understood why he was so hurt by her refusal of his earring until he realized that his feelings for her had grown beyond enjoying their time spent in mutual gratification, and he had flung himself backwards from the entanglement with as much grace and subtlety of Oghren after a dozen pints. The expression of anger and betrayed shock on her face, after she asked him back into her tent and he snapped that she must be able to think of other things and walked away, still haunted him a week later. They had not touched since.

They're silent again, until she leans back on the palm of her empty hand and sighs.

"Marriages are arranged in most alienages," she begins, softly, and Zevran settles back to listen, "when people can afford them, at least. It's pretty expensive to convince an elder to part with a member of the community – even more expensive when they're someone particularly useful, like a blacksmith or a tanner – but if you can't settle on anyone from your own alienage, or it needs fresh blood, it's necessary."

Her father had long known she would never be matched with anyone in Denerim — "I was a troublemaker," she says, "no man would put up with a girl who ran the streets with a gang, no matter that the gang defended the alienage against outsiders," and Zevran huffs a proud laugh – but she would still need to be married, so he wrote up a glowing advertisement of his daughter as if she were a brood mare, not a woman, to tell the elders of other alienages of her good education and strong arms and wide hips, "Perfect for dropping foals," she sneers, and he managed to reel in a blacksmith's apprentice from Highever.

Riona takes a long draught of her wine, and in the silent moment between breaths, Zevran says quietly, "You weren't happy."

She waves the bottle at him gesturatively, shakes her head.

"No, but that wasn't really important. If I didn't like him, no one could make me stay faithful, and if he hurt me I'd separate his hands from his body. So I wasn't happy, but I was still... hopeful. I just hate the process."

Her parents were arranged, she explains, and they were happy together. Being married never stopped Adaia Tabris from causing trouble, teaching her daughter how to fight and defend, to keep her voice loud and her blade sharp, so it wasn't impossible to believe the same could come from her own marriage.

"Plus, you're a child until you're married, and I was eager to be allowed to vote in meetings with the hahrens as an adult." Riona brings the bottle to her mouth again, tips her head far back to drink, then shifts in her seat to lean forward, her elbows on her thighs. She hasn't yet met Zevran's eyes, staring straight ahead into the flickering lights around them, but it doesn't concern him. She's as much releasing the weight of the story from her body as she is telling it to him. It's as much for her as it is for him. She doesn't have to look at him to know he's listening. "I wanted to push for looser curfew restrictions, the right to arm ourselves for protection, the option to send mage children to the Dalish instead of the Circle..."

"You had dreams." 

"I had _plans_ ," Riona says, relishing the word in her mouth, brows pulling down, an arc of her frustration. "Shianni and I weren't satisfied with roaming around at night playing muscle against wandering shems and drunk vagrants. Being married would let me take action for both of us. For all of us. I could put weight behind the words, if I could talk to the community as an equal and convince them to make the humans listen. I don't care about an old stupid empire, we'll never get Arlathan back, but we shouldn't have to live under anyone's thumb like this." She pounds the butt of her wine bottle against the rickety crate underneath her, her voice ringing loud for a brief moment.

Idealism, from his tough, angry Warden, whose beautiful face was more often touched by a snarl than a smile. Zevran has seen it in her before, has been seeing it from the moment she told him to take his place in camp and get Wynne to heal the wounds he'd sustained in trying to kill her, but seeing it here where it had taken root in the dust of so much injustice was something different. He pictures it easily: his lover, softer and more willowy without months of battle and travel, less scarred than she is now but no less passionate, standing before a crowd of her people and demanding that they stand for themselves, and he smiles. If she'd been Antivan, he could have seen her crowned. Here it would have only seen her killed.

Then again, if she'd been Antivan, a better assassin than he might have taken the bid on her instead. The change she calls for never comes without blood.

Riona shakes her head to clear away her old thoughts and leans forward again, the bottle dangling from her fingers to drag back and forth in the dirt at their feet. It is nearly empty, and her green eyes are bright and reflective in the shadow of the venadahl.

"His name was Nelaros," she says, abruptly swerving back to her original story.

It makes Zevran want to kiss her, just as abruptly, that she still remembers the man's name. It shouldn't surprise him, he's seen her exchange names with every sad-looking man, woman, and child from Redcliffe to Orzammar, anyone who seems like they might need help from someone willing to listen, but it still makes him adore her. What a heart she has, to carry so many people, for all her anger.

She tells him of the caravans carrying her and her cousin's future spouses coming earlier than expected, of the elder shifting the wedding date forward. The human Warden who ended up recruiting her, Duncan, arrived that day, and she suspects that somehow the elder had arranged it that way. She'll never get to ask, now. Hahren Valendrian had been shipped off before they had arrived to stop the Tevinters.

"I remember thinking... he didn't seem that bad, not really. Maybe a little soft," Riona laughs shortly, "but it was early yet. And his hair was tied back so neatly, I thought it might be nice if we could braid our hair for each other, every day. A couple ritual."

More often than not, Riona drags her fingers through Zevran's hair when they have sex, stroking his scalp or gripping it to direct his mouth, and afterwards she always combs it straight again, twining the strands deftly to put it back to rights. _A couple ritual._ Something sweet twists in Zevran's chest, soft and tender, sliding sideways into his ribs like a knife, but it's not jealousy and it's not fear, so he turns his mind away from it so he won't have think about it directly while she's still talking.

The slant of Riona's mouth twists, sharp and sour, when she says, "Then the arl's son brought a few of his boys to go slumming."

The story is familiar, now. The men came to the alienage like men always do in worlds like hers, another group in a long line of humans wanting to make use of the lesser. They leered and sniped and put their big hands on women who would sooner have seen them severed than on their bodies but had no power to make it stop. Zevran sees the hate etched in Riona's face still, as she says, "I told them to fuck off. Humans like that are so used to elves that can't say no they don't know what to do when one does it anyway. You don't even need a weapon half the time, they just get their smalls in a twist and go home to sulk. This guy though... He wasn't going to leave unless somebody made him. I could tell. I didn't have a knife on me so I got ready to punch him, but Shianni got there first."

Riona swings her empty bottle into the air with a bared-teeth curl of her lips, more growl than grin. "She clocked the arl's son right over the head with a bottle, smashed it all down his pretty silks!"

The loud, furious woman they'd met earlier absolutely looked like the kind of woman who wouldn't think twice about cracking a man's skull open for crossing her. Riona didn't look much like her in features, dark of hair and skin where Shianni is pale and ginger, but their relation is unquestionable in spirit. Zevran lets out a low whistle of appreciation, and Riona huffs through her nose in agreement.

"I thought so, too. I laughed in his face. His friends kept bleating that he'd come back, but I didn't believe it... Some shiny little shem boy gets blood on his doublet from a hit by a knife-eared bitch? He's just gonna go home and lick his wounds and pretend he didn't get bested by a rabbit with quick reflexes. He wasn't coming back."

But he did, of course. Riona's brief amusement is gone, replaced with a steely expression, and her voice is flat again as she describes the man and his friends striding onto the platform in the middle of the ceremony and grabbing the women of the party. The Revered Mother just stood there, wringing her hands, stammering that they couldn't do what they were doing as if that ever stopped anyone. "I tried to hit him first," Riona says. "He was touching Shianni, looking at her... He wanted to make her pay for hitting him, so I tried to get his attention first, give her the chance to run, but he knocked me out, and locked us in a room in his estate until he and his friends were _ready for us_."

She spits the words, acid in her mouth. That the man is still dead is no comfort.

Zevran hadn't been sure, while she was speaking, how the story would end up tying into what she had told him about her recruitment initially — _I murdered an arl's son in his own bedroom_ , she had said, and even as little as he'd known her then, he was surprised that she said it with venomous fury instead of pride, and he drew his own conclusions. But now he thinks of the angry, uncomfortable way her cousin Shianni's eyes had tracked Alistair's movements when they first approached the gathered crowd of elves, of Riona positioning her body between Shianni and the rest of the party when introducing them, of how Shianni seemed to keep to the opposite side of the room when they had all been gathered within the Tabris home but always kept the human man in sight.

She tells him of the guards that came to take the women to the arl's son, men who knew what he was doing and had no intention of stopping it — who were helping him. "They killed one of us for weeping," Riona bites out. "Her name was Nola."

Names are important to Riona. A girl was scared, and crying, and murdered, and Riona remembers her. Zevran commits the name to his own memory.

She was the last left in the room after the guards had dragged away all of the other women when her cousin Soris came as if from nowhere and threw her a sword.

Her pointed elven teeth glitter in the light of candles in the windows around them when she pulls back her lips again. This time there's no mistaking it for a smile. "It was faster than they deserved."

Duncan had given Soris the weapons, she explains. Soris, and Nelaros. While her cousin searched for her and the other girls, Nelaros had kept watch for other guards that might have passed.

"That sounds brave of them," Zevran says, and Riona's laugh is short and humorless.

"He could have just... gone home," she says sharply, finally turning to look at him. "Do you understand? Everyone saw what happened. Everyone knew what the arl's son was going to do to us. If we ever got back to the alienage, everyone would know we were damaged. Half of us would be heavy with shem children by Satinalia. We'd be worthless as brides, and it's not like we were his community, not yet. He could easily have shrugged his shoulders, given my father back my dowry and booked passage back to Highever."

She reaches across him and relieves him of the bottle of wine he's been ignoring, tips it back and empties it into her mouth. When she lowers it again, her breath is sharp.

"Instead he took a sword he didn't even know how to use and he tried to save us. Knowing what they were going to do to us, what they were already doing, he tried to do the right thing. No one else was with them, do you realize? The boys I'd grown up with, the elders, my own father — it was just the two of them. And they killed him too."

She inhales again, exhales harshly. "The guards cut him down right as Soris and I reached him. He was dead before I made it through the door, and he was holding the wedding ring he'd made for me, and I could have loved him. I could have loved a man with such a heart."

With the fingers not wrapped around the neck of the newly empty bottle, she spins the golden ring on the chain that hangs from her neck. It's not a typical habit of hers, touching the ring. Zevran actually rarely sees her touch it other than to move it aside when she bathes, but he realizes now that it's the only jewelry he's seen her wear in the first place. She passes everyone in camp whatever enchanted bits and pieces she collects on the road, for them to pick for themselves what would help them more, but her hands are always bare, and she never trades the necklace for anything more useful.

And yet when she turned down his earring, he had snapped at her for picking up every trinket they pass but refusing the one he offered. He hadn't even thought.

She looks over at him again then, her jaw set and her shoulders drawn, making her appear both defiant and uncertain. "Foolish, isn't it? To love a cooling corpse?"

Zevran had told her of spitting in his lover's dead face, leaving bootprints behind him in her pooling blood. Riona had touched his stained hands and thanked him for telling her, told him it was not his fault, and yet she fears being stupid to have believed in so hopeless a love. "Not at all, _amora_ ," he tells her honestly. "I think that, too, was brave."

Her answering smile is faint and brief, but it is the most genuine smile Zevran has seen on her face since before her father stumbled from his cage and called her his little girl.

The pair of them fought through the castle to find the other women, she continues, the commotion and the trail of bodies bringing wave after wave of guards upon them, only to die on her borrowed sword because no one thought a little knife-ear in a gown could be a dangerous enough opponent to take seriously. For a moment, as she describes this, Riona sounds vicious and proud, back straight and rigid, chin raised.

In camp, when she would spar with Sten and Alistair, the Qunari would often criticize her footing, telling her to move properly, that she has the whole battlefield and she should use the space to her advantage. She always grinned ruefully and said she was just used to fighting in tighter spaces, then pointed out her style would be more useful in the narrow tunnels of the Deep Roads, and Sten always grunted with displeasure but allowed the point, at least until the next session where he would try to correct her again. Zevran could see her now, going from a young girl learning to fight in back alleys and abandoned warehouses away from human eyes to a young woman cutting a swathe through castle corridors, taking advantage of familiarity with tight quarters to easily outmaneuver soldiers twice her size who had trained for battle in open fields.

"Do you know what he tried to do, when I finally found where he and his friends were holed up?" Riona says, venomous, furious, her expression a twist of cold anger. "He tried to _pay me_. I was covered in his soldiers' blood and he was such a rotting coward he offered me _money_  to leave my friends with him so I wouldn't hurt him. Nola was dead and Shianni was crying and he actually thought he could _bribe_ me."

The idea is so abhorrent that Riona spits in the dirt, red with wine and looking like blood, and Zevran can easily picture her doing the same to the man's face.

He knows many people who would have taken that offer. She drove a sword through the throat of the man who made it without even thinking about it. 

As if exhausted just remembering it all, Riona slumps in her seat, dropping the bottle from loose fingers. It thuds against the dirt, then clinks as it rolls against her previous bottle. "He wasn't even a tough fight, in the end," she mutters bitterly, shaking her head. "I was furious with myself for how weak he was. He was so easy, _too_ easy. I could have killed him bare handed back in the alienage. I _should_ have."

Cut one man down and another will slide into the gap left behind, for good or ill. The politics of Antiva run almost entirely on the concept. Zevran has seen it, he has contributed to either side of the inevitability. He had never before cared whether the throat under his knife belonged to a good person or a wicked one.

The rest of the story is simple to predict — Riona and Soris led the rescued women through the streets of Denerim and back into the alienage with no protest from what was left of the arl's guards. Zevran imagines Riona at the head of the procession like a warrior queen before an army, borrowed sword naked and bright in her hand, blood crusting on her gown, stiffening her hair, dripping down her face, her head held high, daring anyone to challenge her for the illegal weapon as she parted the crowds of Denerim for her friends.

"The city guards finally came — to arrest me, of course." Riona's laugh is as brittle-edged as the rest of her has been all evening. "I'm sure they were busy if anyone tried to tell them about the arl's son, but when there was a knife-ear to put down? Oh, they couldn't drag their sagging arses out of the Pearl and into their boots fast enough."

She told the guards it had been only her — Soris had taken Shianni to the Tabris home already, so Riona was the only one left standing in the open with a weapon in her hands and blood on her clothes. "I knew I was going to swing," she says, "but no one else had to join me. The guard didn't believe me — 'You expect me to believe one woman did all of that?' he asked, and I laughed in his face. Told him I could give him a demonstration if he wanted!"

Then the Grey Warden Duncan had stepped forward and claimed her for his order, and her life had ended regardless.

"And now you know," she says, after a long moment of quiet from both of them. "Widowed before I was wed. Not really as funny as a cake mix-up."

"Thank you for telling me," he returns, repeating what she said to him after he told her of Rinna. She reaches out and touches his hand with hers, and he turns his over, palm up, to lace their fingers together.

Zevran imagines reaching over and taking the weight of her long hair in his hands, separating it, winding it into the braid she always wears. He imagines his earring, burning in his pocket where he shoved it after she turned it down, shining against the warm brown of her skin.

She remembers the name of a man she knew for an hour when he died for her, she mourns him and remembers the gesture he never had the chance to make her. She would have taken Zevran's earring if he'd had the spine to tell her he meant more with the offer than just passing her a trinket. She would have taken his heart if he'd been able to admit he was offering it.

With his other hand, he touches the earring in his pocket. They'll be back in camp tomorrow night. He will offer it again.

**Author's Note:**

> come hang out with me [on tumblr](http://against-stars.tumblr.com/), it's mostly Dragon Age and me rambling or doodling my silly OCs.


End file.
